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50 Years In, Lincoln Center’s Name Is Still a Mystery

Bob SeratingBreaking ground for Lincoln Center on May 14, 1959: President Dwight D. Eisenhower did the honors, after Leonard Bernstein conducted the New York Philharmonic in a makeshift tent.

And so, this Monday morning, let us celebrate the Great Emancipator himself, Abraham Lincoln, who gave his name to Lincoln Center, which commemorates the 50th anniversary of its groundbreaking with an artistic and political extravaganza in the newly renovated Alice Tully Hall starting at 10:30 a.m. (See ArtsBeat for live coverage.)

Not.

Or, well, perhaps.

Surprisingly, after five decades, the origin of the word “Lincoln” in Lincoln Center “is a mystery,” said Judith Johnson, Lincoln Center’s corporate archivist. “It is one of those questions that should have an answer — because so many other places in New York have a reason for their naming. But that’s not true here.”

Certainly there is no doubt, she said, that it was decided, in 1956, to name Lincoln Center after the neighborhood in which it was built: Lincoln Square, formally the area between Columbus and Amsterdam Avenues between West 63rd Street and West 66th Street.

After all, in 1906 the Shubert Organization opened a 1,600-seat theater there called the Lincoln Square, on what is currently the site of the Juilliard School. There was even a six-story loft, the Lincoln Square Arcade, where painters, sculptors and photographers toiled in studios for many years.

AP Photo/NY Public Library, Alexander GardnerWas Lincoln Center really named after the Great Emancipator?

Records conclusively show that the New York City Board of Aldermen formally named the area Lincoln Square in May of 1906. The minutes of their meetings are devoid of discussion, however, about the reason for the name. Newspapers of the time, including The New York Times and The Brooklyn Eagle, shed no light on the question, Ms. Johnson said.

As to whether Honest Abe provided the inspiration, “we couldn’t find anything that was conclusive one way or the other,” she said.

On Manhattan’s Upper West Side, “there used to be an idea that the area was called Lincoln Farms,” said Harold Holzer, co-chairman of the Lincoln Bicentennial Commission. “Perhaps it was a long-held urban myth that dates back to the time of a rural myth.”

But the property records in the New York Municipal Archives list six local landowners in the area, and nary a Lincoln surname among them: Thomas Hall, Johannes van Bruch, Stephan de Lancey, James de Lancey, James de Lancey Jr. and John Somerindyck.

“We searched obituaries, archives of the parks department and many other records and couldn’t find any landowner with the name of Lincoln,” Ms. Johnson said.

And Mr. Holzer, who has written 34 books about Lincoln and the Civil War, confirmed that many historians have “looked in the archives and it is truly bizarre that there is no record of why it was named Lincoln Square.”

The whole Lincoln name thing gets even trickier. When the Board of Aldermen granted Lincoln Square its name in 1906, during a time that the city was designating many named squares, the city’s mayor was George B. McClellan.

The New York TimesGeorge B. McClellan, son of the Civil War general, was mayor when Lincoln Square was named in 1906.

Yes, that McClellan: the son of the Civil War general and Lincoln rival who was so contemptuous of the Railsplitter that he once called him “the original gorilla.”

“There is the wonderful irony,” Mr. Holzer said of the possibility that Lincoln Square was named after the president during the tenure of a New York mayor who was “the son of the general who gave Lincoln more difficulty than anyone during the Civil War — the McClellan who opposed emancipation and ran against Lincoln in 1864.” Yet if the general had been insulting to Lincoln, the president was also uncharacteristically harsh in referring to McClellan, terming the glacially moving general’s Army of the Potomac “McClellan’s bodyguard,” Mr. Holzer said.

“One has to reasonably assume that the square was named for Abraham Lincoln,” he added, but the dearth of references to the president in the records could have been inspired by the legacy of enmity between the general and the commander. “Perhaps they played down the connection to President Lincoln in deference to the sensibilities of the McClellan family,” Mr. Holzer said.

Nota bene: any of those (and there are some) who think that the center was named after Lincoln Kirstein — the balletomane and onetime director of Lincoln Center for three years who had previously been a founder of the New York City Ballet and the School of American Ballet with George Balanchine — could not be more wrong.

But quite interestingly, Mr. Kirstein was “a Lincoln collector who wanted very much to have the fountain on the plaza surround a sculpture of Abraham Lincoln, which he proposed, based on a model of a sculpture he had in his own collection,” Mr. Holzer said. The idea was never realized.

In the end, all such considerations will count for little when the celebration begins in Alice Tully Hall with a performance of “Fanfare for the Common Man” by Aaron Copland (a nod to a more verifiable, non-Lincolnian tradition: that Leonard Bernstein had that theme played at the 1959 groundbreaking).

Then, Audra McDonald will sing. Itzhak Perlman and Wynton Marsalis will play. Tom Brokaw will be the anchorman — er, host. The mayor, the governor and New York’s senior senator are expected to speak. And all the while, the festivities will be streamed, live, on the Lincoln Center Web site.

But none of the revelers will resolve the obscure question of how Lincoln Center got its name.

Well, lots of luck with the “MIssing Lincoln” you archivists and history buffs, all I care about is that my old high school, “The H.S. of Commerce” had to be razed to make way for Lincoln Center…the school that turned out the likes of Billy Rose, world champion of shorthand, personal secretary to Bernard Baruch and later, of Diamond Horseshoe fame. Lou Gehrig, who then went on to Columbia University where the Yankees couldn’t wait for him to graduate, and lastly, and most unexpectedly, the actor, Hans Conreid, who most people assumed was British, due to his plummy diction and comically aloof stage and screen presence.

When I came to New York on September 11th 1961 I stayed at the West Side YMCA.
My first day out I wandered half a block west to Broadway and promply got lost.
The whole neighborhood was leveled to build Lincoln Center, so I asked some hard hat construction workers who were sitting on a small pile of blocks how to get back to the Y.
One of them pointed across the street and said, “Just walk across the street where you just came from.. It’s that building right over there.”
That’s the thing I love most about New York City.
If you get lost there’s always someone to find you.

Speaking of Billy Rose;
I could have been in a legitimate Equity Off Broadway Production of ‘ “This Is Your Life, Miss Vaudeville,” at the former “Diamond Horseshoe.”
Just like Betty Grable.
The producer wanted to get me into Actor’s Equity, pay for my singing and dancing lessons and have me stay with him at his home in Forest Hills.
I turned the offer down.
I did go to the opening night and the producer came up to me at intermission and said, “You could have been in the show.”
I nodded yes.
The next morning The New York Times headline stated, “Vaudeville Is Dead, And Last Night (name of producer) Kicked The Corpse!”

Funny you should bring this up! I had just posted in the Q&A with Reynold Levy, suggesting that the center be re-named in honor of Beverly Sills, who has done more for it than anyone named Lincoln ever did. And now you’ve given us the perfect reason to do so.

Could the square just have been named in honor of a great president, even if he never set foot in it? How many places are named after Washington for no reason other than the fact that he was great? Or maybe because Lincoln got assassinated…look how many Kennedy buildings we have.

Umm, not to doubt a writer for The New York Times or anything, but we all KNOW how “Lincoln Center got its name.” What we don’t know is exactly how Lincoln Square got its name. A small exercise in clear journalism, no doubt, but we want to look good for the sake of the kids.

The Lincoln Arcade along with other buildings mentioned in the above comments existed on the area that became Lincoln Center. It is referred to as Lincoln Square Arcade, but to the artists it was called the Lincoln Arcade. Richard Lillis (1899-1994), an illustrator, told many stories about the Lincoln Arcade being owned by a family by the name of Miller who were lenient with the artists in the studio building since it appears that there was someone in their family that was an artist. There is a rich history about the artists in the Lincoln Arcade and there seems to be little recorded about that building and less in historical photography. The Lincoln Center construction has replaced that upper west side.

Lincoln Kirstein the balletomane who headed the NYCB etc…is the best answer for bringing it’s name into enthusiastic popularity (I always believed). Afterall it was LK who in 1930, invited the 20 year old George Ballanchine (from The Ballet Ruesse), to come to the USA, and is considered the Father of American Ballet. Makes more sense for an artistic venue!

Barry Fischer

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